I was shocked, in 2026, to know how hard it is to find a good tablet. iPad is out of question for me, gifted mine to my gf (the only apple device I ever bought).

Landed on a Lenovo Idea Tab pro, which has so much junk pre-installed that keep installing other malware on it.

We need rules that take companies responsible when they trick people into hands of scammers.

As long as I can't unlock its bootloader, it's not much better than that iPad.

I just did something similar to bring mainline Linux to my Daylight DC-1 [1] [2], although possibly more difficult since I had to start from scratch.

I can guarantee the same amount of work, without AI, takes probably 10x or more time (I did it in the past w/ the Google Pixel C [3]).

Unfortunately it looks like pmOS is against AI [4], so I'll likely switch away from pmOS and never contribute a single line in the future. Too bad, I was a huge fan [5].

[1]: https://daylightcomputer.com/product

[2]: https://x.com/DenysVitali/status/2091238391710888416

[3]: https://github.com/pixelc-linux/documentation

[4]: https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop...

[5]: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/

Recently I was in the market for what I would call a 'low cost linux netbook/tablet' and settled on the Chuwi Minibook X. It has an Intel N150 processor, 16GB of memory and a 512GB nvme drive. For less than $300. I am wildly impressed by it. Touchpad is really terrible but otherwise it is a surprisingly compelling little device. I am still fine tuning the tablet mode stuff -- it doesn't have any hinge measurement sensors it relies on an accelerometer in each half. Codex has been helping me write some cool tools to debug and parse those raw readings into "im in laptop mode" or "im in tablet mode, disable kb/touchpad". I just installed KDE Plasma Mobile yesterday which is quite a cool alternate DE that is more suited to tablets. Here is a video of that codex tooling to help debug the hinge situation: https://www.threads.com/@whalesalad/post/DdYNriIAFO4

    "I also now work at Canonical..."

You know the guy doesn't easily give up if he has gone through Canonicals famous 10-20 round interviews.

For x86 based ChromeOS devices check https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html It allows installing a standard UEFI environment if supported.

Wow! Serendipitous, I was just doing the same thing on my duet (trogdor) but I was focused on using Claude to enable the camera (missing in the device tree). I taught it to use depthcharge to reboot into the previous Kernel if a build failed; otherwise boot and start the same Claude chat so I could just let it iterate for days. It took a day to get something usable, pretty amazing.

Then I setup `howdy` to use the camera for auth.

now I’m just trying to figure out if I’m allowed to submit this upstream. Postmarketos explicitly rejects LLM submission, but I can submit it to linux-next. Seems to me a shame, this enables folks who have devices and want to fix things (but lack the time/knowledge) to use these LLM powers for a very good cause.

Plasma mobile has been really great for me, you should try it out!

I have an Acer Flip 1 (4GB, passively cooled Intel CPU). And I find GNOME to run really well on this. Compiling large C++ codebases is where the slowness gets in the way. Even VS Code kinda ran. Mostly used this in a lab for data logging, note taking. Just want to say this because the popular "GNOME is heavy" argument is not something I've experienced myself. GNOME 3 is already so old, maybe it was heavy when it came out, like how Crysis was heavy but will now run on anything and pretty well too.

I went to LinuxFest Northwest a few months ago, and there was a booth giving away Chromebooks that had been wiped and had a version of NixOS installed on there for free. I very seriously considered grabbing one, but I was only traveling with a backpack which was already pretty full, and I think my wife would (rightfully) give me a dirty look if I hoarded more tech that I'll only use like twice a year.

I kind of regret it now. Oh well, I'll probably come across another cheap Chromebook soon enough to play with.

Cool but my Duet is the later generation with MediaTek Kompanio 838 :(

I really like the form factor. I use my PC at home and corp laptop for work, and I don't need another powerhouse laptop. A lightweight 2-in-1 tablet works well for me. But I never found an OS doing well in both desktop and tablet modes. Most Windows and Linux apps are for desktop. ChromeOS with ArcVM is supposed to work but the performance is terrible. I hope Android desktop mode would do better.

I recently put Debian on an old 13" Asus Chromebook. It was surprisingly easy! I don't remember doing much other than removing a screw and installing a UEFI firmware on it. Everything worked out of the box.

It works pretty well too, as long as you temper your expectations around 4GB of RAM and aren't expecting to watch YouTube on it. (Older machines and phones are just not at all happy about 60fps videos.)

I actually just pulled out my old Duet and took a quick look to see if I could just put proper Linux on it. Didn't seem feasible for the amount of effort I was willing to put into it, so I bailed. Reading this, though, I now see I was definitely right and I'm glad I didn't sink much time into the endeavour lol

Cool post nonetheless!

This is too cool. I actually have this exact tablet, and have basically barely ever used it because ChromeOS just crawls no matter what you do with it on that device. Every once in a while I do a search to see if anyone has done anything interesting with it, and it seems that day has finally come. I will give your image a try later tonight!

This is a great write-up about installing Linux on Chromebook.

Thank you for sharing it!

someone needs to do this for the arm Surface Pro 11.

kinda cool, looks like a laptop